Hacktivists scorch PBS in retaliation for WikiLeaks documentary

Anonymous hacking group Lulzsec hacked a PBS webserver, planting a false story …

A hacker group unhappy with PBS Frontline’s hour-long documentary on WikiLeaks has hit back at the Public Broadcasting System by cracking its servers, posting thousands of stolen passwords, and adding a fake news story to a blog belonging to the august PBS Newshour.

On Sunday night, visitors to the Newshour website read the news that famed rapper Tupac Shakur had been found “alive and well” in New Zealand. The false story (Tupac died in 1996) was indexed by Google News, and spread rapidly through Facebook and Twitter, even after PBS pulled it down. “Again, our site has been hacked—please stay with us as we work on it,” read one of the Newshour’s several tweets responding to the incident Sunday.

The anonymous hacking group Lulzsec claimed credit for the attack in its Twitter feed, where it linked to several pages displaying information stolen in the hack. A calling card the intruders installed at pbs.org/lulz/ was still live by 2:00am EDT. The text read “All your base are belong to Lulzsec.” The title of the page was “FREE BRADLEY MANNING. FUCK FRONTLINE!”

On May 24, Frontline aired an hour-long documentary, “WikiSecrets,” that profiled suspected WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning. [Disclosure: Threat Level’s Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter were interviewed for the program]. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was interviewed at length for the documentary, roundly criticized the piece even before it aired, writing that the program was “hostile and misrepresents WikiLeaks’ views and tries to build an ‘espionage’ case against its founder, Julian Assange, and also the young soldier, Bradley Manning.”

Bradley Manning supporters have also criticized the program for its emphasis on Manning’s emotional problems, and for not exploring the highly restrictive conditions of Manning’s pre-trial confinement, which were eased last month after nearly a year in custody.

“We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed,” Lulzsec wrote in an announcement of the hack. “We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further perusing.”

Earlier this month Lulzsec hacked Sony’s Japanese website, and before that Fox.com, where the group stole and posted 363 employee passwords, the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of 73,000 people who had signed up for audition information for the upcoming Fox talent show The X-Factor. Lulzsec says it’s not part of Anonymous, despite sharing what appears to be a common ethos with the Internet’s most famous gang of troublemakers.

In addition to the fake news story Sunday, the group tweeted links to pastebins of the internal IP addresses and names of PBS servers, a top-level view of PBS’ website database, and large caches of e-mail addresses and passwords, including those for 200 PBS affiliates around the country, dozens of PBS bloggers, and 1,500 third-party newspaper and media reporters who’d signed up for access to PBS’s “pressroom” of photos, clips and press releases.

Less than impressed? So lemme get this right, if someone airs somethat Lulzsec or Anon doesn't like, they disagree with or what not they become ground for attack?

Are they not doing much the same thing they are trying to "protest" against?

How is that any different compared to what traditional media did (not to mention politicians calling for torture and murdering)? Clearly it doesn't work to sit at home and be unhappy.

This will at least bring the whole situation to the light of public a bit more. Not that I expect too much from a nation that is becoming famous for brainwashing it's citizens but still haven't lost all hope.

Less than impressed? So lemme get this right, if someone airs somethat Lulzsec or Anon doesn't like, they disagree with or what not they become ground for attack?

Are they not doing much the same thing they are trying to "protest" against?

You're confusing government transparency with freedom of speech.

WL & Anon would probably say they are about exposing the truth, not about allowing anyone to say anything regardless of evidence... and here I suspect they see PBS as spreading lies about themselves (having not seen the doc I have zero opinion... yet).

How is that any different compared to what traditional media did (not to mention politicians calling for torture and murdering)? Clearly it doesn't work to sit at home and be unhappy.

This will at least bring the whole situation to the light of public a bit more. Not that I expect too much from a nation that is becoming famous for brainwashing it's citizens but still haven't lost all hope.

Yes, let just run around rioting and become anarchists because we all need to hear all your crazy conspiracies.

WL & Anon would probably say they are about exposing the truth, not about allowing anyone to say anything regardless of evidence...

Apologist, so you're condoning their actions? I'm sure you'll say you don't, but you conveniently remain "neutral" to look better in the face of your peers. When will it be something you care for that you'll start to make your almighty judgement?

Also, you have to wonder if their hackivism could have been better directed. Obviously they aren't capable of going after whatever government agency that are holding Manning, but certainly there has to be soft targets that aren't journalists.

The whole point of free speech and democracy (the ideals they say Wikileaks stand for) is that various views and criticisms can be vetted by the public. Going after journalist that express different view sounds like something China or Iran would do for airing something critical to their respective central governments.

Sorry but that's just hilarious, "Tupac Shakur alive and well in New Zealand".

Evil_Merlin wrote:

Less than impressed? So lemme get this right, if someone airs somethat Lulzsec or Anon doesn't like, they disagree with or what not they become ground for attack?

Are they not doing much the same thing they are trying to "protest" against?

They generally protest against overbearing governments crossing the line, such as the U.S government's detention one of their own citizens (Manning) in gulag-like conditions for the crime of embarrassing them, and trying desperately to do the same to Assange for publishing evidence of that corruption. So no, they're not quite doing the same thing.

Assange's method of forcing political transparency is obviously not ideal, but if it's a choice between the brutal transparency that Wikileaks offers, or just having "faith" in an institution of corrupt thugs to police themselves, actually knowing the truth and being able to hold authority accountable is the better option.

Before anyone mentions how "dangerous" the leaks are, please have your example ready of someone who was unambiguously harmed by the release of information therein. The government themselves have yet to come up with an example as far as I know, despite all their claims of them putting troops in harms way.

I don't know; on one hand, attacking journalists is bad, and implicitly threatening others to stop negative portrayals of themselves is definitely bad.

On the other hand, all the large well-known news services are owned by a very exclusive group of media interests, and/or the government, and the two often work hand-in-hand with each other to achieve common goals.

What are those without money or influence, other than in the digital sphere, meant to do in response?

[EDIT] Of course, this particular course of action only serves to be counter-productive and feed into the establishment's portrayal of internet vigilante groups as wild, out of control hooligans, so obviously a better response is needed.

What though, when you have no access to the large media channels that the everyday public follows for news and information? (And before you say the internet, our view of the internet as opening up information and 'truth' is hugely biased by our subjectivity - in actual fact, it has nowhere near the reach or market penetration of mainstream media amongst the public.)

Look on the bright side. Some companies pay security consultants thousands of dollars to test their server's security setup. Lulzsec did it for free. Maybe they should fire their IT guys, hire Lulzsec, and pull their heads out of their butts and start doing some real reporting again rather than skewed pieces like the fear-mongering wikileaks piece they ran.

WL & Anon would probably say they are about exposing the truth, not about allowing anyone to say anything regardless of evidence... and here I suspect they see PBS as spreading lies about themselves (having not seen the doc I have zero opinion... yet).

Right. And I'm sure PBS was under the impression that the documentary was a pack of lies built to brainwash the American public (in service to their government masters, of course).

More often than not, truth is a socially-constructed value. Imposing your truth -- be it through lies, use of select facts, or intimidation -- is a fundamental problem to me. I read groups like this as perpetrating a "violence of thought" quite similar to those they protest.

Look on the bright side. Some companies pay security consultants thousands of dollars to test their server's security setup. Lulzsec did it for free. Maybe they should fire their IT guys, hire Lulzsec, and pull their heads out of their butts and start doing some real reporting again rather than skewed pieces like the fear-mongering wikileaks piece they ran.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but if you aren't:

I'm not sure you saw the piece I saw. Or the other piece Frontline did about it from a different point of view, namely profiling Manning. On that scale, if this was fear mongering, someone expressing their opinion is a nuclear bomb. Frontline is known for being balanced, if critical, which is *exactly* what they were doing here.

Look on the bright side. Some companies pay security consultants thousands of dollars to test their server's security setup. Lulzsec did it for free. Maybe they should fire their IT guys, hire Lulzsec, and pull their heads out of their butts and start doing some real reporting again rather than skewed pieces like the fear-mongering wikileaks piece they ran.

I see the bright side to all the recent hacking stories being that companies will now see the tangible physical effects of cutting corners in IT security. This only bodes well for those of us who work in the field, and can now get more respect and compensation for the work we do. IT security CAN be done right, you don't see banks and government losing their servers to script kiddies, do you? When I was taking security classes for my minor at university, the general train of thought was that you would have to work in either government or banking... no one else cared enough about IT security to pay top dollar.

Honestly I don't even think any of the hacking victims would care about losing their data if not for the PR nightmare it has become, and thanks to Ars for keeping it in the spotlight!

They generally protest against overbearing governments crossing the line, such as the U.S government's detention one of their own citizens (Manning) in gulag-like conditions for the crime of embarrassing them, and trying desperately to do the same to Assange for publishing evidence of that corruption. So no, they're not quite doing the same thing.

Manning isn't "in gulag-like conditions for the crime of embarrassing them." He's imprisoned for leaking classified documents, which is explicitly outlawed. Regardless of what you think of the law, it was something that quite clearly was stated and known in advance. He's imprisoned for violating the law, not for embarrassing his government.

I see the bright side to all the recent hacking stories being that companies will now see the tangible physical effects of cutting corners in IT security. This only bodes well for those of us who work in the field, and can now get more respect and compensation for the work we do. IT security CAN be done right, you don't see banks and government losing their servers to script kiddies, do you? When I was taking security classes for my minor at university, the general train of thought was that you would have to work in either government or banking... no one else cared enough about IT security to pay top dollar.

What? Banks are attacked all the time. Data is lost. Accounts are closed daily. Governments are attacked to by their own people *achem* Manning. Security doesn't prevent loss, it simply slows it down. What we have today is celebrity 1upmanship and a "my truth" thumb to make sure establishments do what activists want them to do.

It costs billions of dollars biannually to prevent a group from making the internet a living hell and you want to high-five them?

And if PBS had run a pro-Manning program, then their funding would be under attack. They picked the least-lethal blowback.

Their funding has been under attack long before this program aired. I've heard plenty of NPR programs that are critical of the government. You may want to reconsider what amounts to an ad hominem argument.

As an IT professional I know I should be decrying these sort of things and I know it would be a terrible, terrible mess to be on the receiving end of but, really, I can't help but laugh at this stunt.

Why is it funny? Because a group of people decided to attack a journalism site known for even handedness in a misguided attempt to "protest" something that was barely an argument? If anything it's sad that the people behind it are even MORE brainless than the average anonymous event.

They generally protest against overbearing governments crossing the line, such as the U.S government's detention one of their own citizens (Manning) in gulag-like conditions for the crime of embarrassing them, and trying desperately to do the same to Assange for publishing evidence of that corruption. So no, they're not quite doing the same thing.

Manning isn't "in gulag-like conditions for the crime of embarrassing them." He's imprisoned for leaking classified documents, which is explicitly outlawed. Regardless of what you think of the law, it was something that quite clearly was stated and known in advance. He's imprisoned for violating the law, not for embarrassing his government.

It could be worse for Mr. Manning. Fifty years ago, my opinion is that leaking classified information of this magnituded would have been treated as treason, and he would have been summarily executed. Remember it could always be worse. He should be thanking his lucky stars that he's still alive.